Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in New Mexico? Are you interested in teaching English in Freehold Borough, New Mexico? Check out our opportunities in Freehold Borough, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
This unit focuses on classroom management, which is the skill of organizing the class, individual students in the class and what takes place within the class.
The material I found most beneficial from this unit is about eye contact, gesture and the use of student names. Eye contact is used in order to: show students they are all included, ensure understanding, indicate who is to speak, encourage participation, hold attention of students not being addressed, maintain discipline, signal the start or end of an activity as well as the pace, indicate whether something is correct or incorrect and to check everyone is participating. Gestures on the other hand can be used to convey meaning of the language, manage the class, reinforce instructions, add visual interest, increase the pace of a lesson and to decrease the need for verbal explanations.
Additionally, there are many factors that affect the way a teacher would arrange a classroom. A teacher must consider the space available, the type of chairs and tables, age of the students as well as the students' personalities. For example, orderly rows might best serve a large class that is about to take a test, whereas the circle or horseshoe format may best foster an intimate experience that is great for pair work (works well for small classes). Once the classroom is arranged, it is important for a teacher to remember this his/her position in the room helps convey multiple things to the students, such as the type of activity they might be doing, the teacher's role in said activity as well as what the students are expected to do.
Lastly, one topic to be mindful of is how a teacher gives instructions. Does he/she speak in simple language (a level lower than that of the lesson at hand)? Is the teacher consistent in their use of word choices for giving instructions? Does the teacher check for understanding of the instructions by asking questions of the students? Does the teacher demonstrate what is expected of the students? If a teacher can answer yes to these questions, then he/she is doing a great job reducing his/her talk time and increasing that of his/her students.
While there are many other subjects covered in this unit, these are the ones I found most relevant to my own teaching practice – items that I can be more mindful about!
